The New Town Car

We address ourselves today to the most vexing problem of the peripatetic city dweller: how shall he transport himself, or himself and his date, or himself and his date and a brace of friends, in today's jackstraw tangle of traffic? Supposing he wants to pick up his girl who lives uptown, take her downtown to a friend's pad for a drink, then, with friend, go to pick up his date just on the edge of the suburbs; then, four now, to dinner and a show, and afterward, a club on the other side of town for a nightcap. Bus? Subway? Are you out of your mind? Taxis? Fine, but an evening for four people, if they happen to live in neighborhoods distant from one another, will seriously erode a $20 note.

There remains your private automobile, and that has been, until recently, a source of small comfort. As common a cliché as any has been the one about the folly of keeping a car in town, what with garage rentals, impenetrable traffic, the impossibility of finding a place to park. For the past few years, with Detroit-made automobiles growing steadily longer, fatter and thirstier, there's been much wisdom in the cri de coeur of the urbanite who says he would shoot himself before he'd buy another car. But things have changed. Now there is hope.

Before we go on, it should be stated that one simple, perfect solution to this problem exists now as it has always existed: the gentleman's private carriage. Buy a good limousine – Rolls-Royce has a newish model, the P-V, at $24,500 – hire a chauffeur for, say, $100 a week, and let him worry about where to park the thing while you're in the theatre. He'll check with the box office to learn when the show breaks, and when it does, there he'll be, waiting, with the opera light winking on the roof so that you can tell your Rolls-Royce from the others. If this solution appeals to you, and is otherwise feasible, stop here – you have nothing further to learn from us.

The problem isn't limited to intraurban transportation. What of the weekend in the country? What of the football game sixty miles away? What could be more dismal than waking up alone to the Sunday papers on a morning that should have found you in gay company a long way from home? But is avoiding the pang worth housing a hulking nineteen-foot barge useful for little else? Hardly.

The answer is the small automobile, now fully come of age. Small automobiles have been around for years, but until recently the choice was limited and the small car tended to be stark and uninteresting. It is no longer. Today you can buy smart, comfortable, fast small convertibles and hardtops off the peg. They're good-looking enough to stay in any company, fast enough to waste no time, small enough to stick in a parking space big cars can't use.

We are not talking here about sports cars. In fact, sports cars are specifically excluded on the grounds that the two-seaters are too small, the four-seaters vastly too expensive, and both types less than ideally suited mechanically for urban use. We're concerned here with two types of automobiles: the first is the chic, good-looking, useful convertible or hardtop, suitable, in the light of today's flexible mores, for any social occasion; the second is the simpler, starker, cheaper utilitarian four-seater, the basic transporter. The first type we'll call the town car; the second, the hack – a useful and much-abused word which has been sicklied o'er with negative and taximetric connotations, but which merits revival in its pristine meaning: a handy, vehicular city conveyance.

To begin close to the center of the circle, and with the town car, there are five American-made specimens: Corvair, Falcon, Valiant, Lark, Rambler. These are the so-called "compact" automobiles, smaller than the standard Detroiters, bigger than the small Europeans. The Corvair, made by Chevrolet, has an air-cooled flat six engine mounted in the rear. Unlike most air-cooled engines, it's fairly quiet, and since it's air-cooled its owner is relieved of any concern about freeze-ups. Like all rear-engine cars, the Corvair has a tendency toward oversteer (the sensation that the car wants to go deeper into the corner than the angle of the steering wheels would warrant), but it's so slight, and appears only at such high speeds that the chances are you'll never notice it.

Wise-eyed laymen are apt to view the advent of any such "new" design as the Corvair with the remark that they'll wait to buy until the "bugs" have been got out of it. It seems that there are few bugs left in the Corvair, and they're being quickly eliminated. The design and placement of the rear engine, the "radical" design feature of the car, owes a great deal to long-established Volkswagen and Porsche practice; for another thing, the car has run millions of miles in test.

Ford's Falcon is a standard conventional automobile, a successful attempt to create a sedan that will accommodate six adults on a wheel base rather less than that of a Greyhound bus. The compromise is wholly successful. The Falcon is simple without being stark, and graceful but not gaudy. Like the Corvair, it's an 80-85-mile-an-hour motorcar and should average more than 20 miles to the gallon of gasoline. (Mercury's Comet is somewhat bigger – 195 inches overall – than the other small cars and really doesn't belong in the compact class at all.)

The Valiant, by Chrysler, is the biggest – by an inch or so – the heaviest and the fastest of the Big Three compact models. It's a little more lush than the other two, more strikingly styled, down to a simulated spare-tire bulge on the rear deck. It will do 100 miles an hour, and it may very well be the forerunner of tomorrow's compact luxury car. The notion that a small car de grande luxe may be produced in Detroit in a couple of years has struck many Americans as odd, so successfully has advertising propaganda accustomed us to the notion that only big cars can be luxurious. The fact is that the idea is a common one, and timeworn at that. The Rolls-Royce people used to produce a tiny jewel-like model called The Twenty for the number of its horsepower by British rating; during the 1930s the Brewster coach builders, and others, built limousines and genuine coupes de vile, town cars, on the first Ford V-8 chassis, very short by today's standards. A coupe de ville of the Thirties on a Ford Model A chassis, newly restored, created a sensation at an Eastern classic car show not long ago.

To return to the list of American town cars, all of the Big Three offerings can be had, in a manner of speaking, for $2000, but in practice you'll find it happiest to have another two or three hundred in hand when you walk into the dealership.

The Studebaker Lark, which has been selling at such a rate that the New York Stock Exchange had briefly to suspend dealings in Studebaker last autumn, so that the ticker could catch up, offers a wider line of compact cars than the Big Three do so far: a sedan, a station wagon, and a convertible, with option of six- or eight-cylinder engines, and prices starting around $2100. The Larks are sturdy, well-made cars – Studebaker craftsmanship has always been notable – and are very gracefully styled. When they're powered by the eight-cylinder engines they will move competitively with any car in the class and with some that would seem to be out of it.

The American Motors people, whom we used to know as the Nash people, certainly broke ground for the U.S. compact automobiles, and their Rambler is one of the important examples. The Rambler is a 100-inch-wheel base car, priced at under $2000 anywhere in the country. The Rambler is an American standard.

That's the lot, as far as domestic compact numbers go. They offer a decently wide choice, but much greater variety is available when the category is expanded to include imported makes.

The new Rover 3-liter is probably the most luxurious small car in the world, and, at $4995, one of the most expensive. It has a wheel base of 110.5 inches, four inches longer than the Chrysler Company's Valiant. The Rover has been designed for quiet, long life and driving ease. The immaculate leather and walnut interior reflects the British company's policy of using only the best material, where it shows and where it does not as well. The Rover shares twenty-odd points of mechanical similarity with the Rolls-Royce, and every knowledgeable tester who drives a Rover inevitably compares it with that make. It's one of the world's great cars.

The Citroë'n ID 19 is currently one of the most intriguing automobiles on the world's roadways, a brand-new design by an old-line French house. The body shell is radical in appearance, dashing and "quick" in line, drive is to the front wheels in accordance with Citroën practice since 1932, and the suspension is not by springs but by a unique air-and-oil system. It is my considered opinion that the Citroën ID 19 and the more expensive DS 19 produce the most comfortable ride of any car in the world, regardless of price. Particularly over rough surface, the comfort, the smoothness and the road adhesion all border on the incredible. The ID 19 sells at around $2740 with foam-rubber seats, $2590 with standard types.

A lovely small town car is the Lancia Appia, a "pillarless" sedan with a great V-4 engine. A pillarless sedan is one in which the rear door is hinged in back and the front door in front, so that both open in the center of the car; they close on small steel pegs set in floor and roof, so that there's no center pillar to squeeze past. Pillarless construction is very useful in a small sedan, but it's expensive, and the Appia goes for around $3000. It's 99 inches in wheel base, five inches more than a Volkswagen, and 135 inches overall as against the VW's 160. The difference reflects a basic tenet in Lancia design: put the wheels as close to the ends of the car as possible, and thus avoid overhanging metal with its destructive effect on stability. Like all Lancias, the Appia is a fine road car.

The Jaguar people, best known for fast two-seaters, make a compact car, the 3.8 model. This used to be called the 2.4 and then the 3.4, reflecting the size of the engine in liters. The 3.8 engine is a big one by European standards at 3800 cubic centimeters capacity. (For comparison, the Valiant engine measures 2791 c.c.) The 3.8 Jag runs a 107-inch wheel base, is 180 inches overall, the same as the Corvair. It's a fast car (well over 100), has brutal acceleration and all the amenities: leather, walnut, occasional tables in the rear, disk brakes on all wheels, automatic transmission, the lot, for $5000 plus. The 3.8 even has power steering, which almost no foreign cars have, or need (they're light). It's not really a town car, though. It's a gran turismo car.

Another British product in a lower price range is the MG Magnette at $2695. This is a 178-inch sedan running on 68 horsepower put through a standard transmission. (Incidentally, only comparatively big, expensive items like Rover and Jaguar offer fully automatic transmissions of the type we're used to in this country. Hillman is the one exception. Some small cars such as DKW, SAAB, Renault and NSU Prinz offer an automatic clutch; a Dutch car, the DAF, not yet widely sold here, has infinitely variable transmission through expanding pulleys, but most commonly an imported car offers a steering-postmounted stick shift.) Some tradition-minded firms (MG is one) still make a floor-mounted shift. They may be right. After all, the newest American cars, the compacts, use floor-mounted manual shifts. They are simple, trouble-free, more pleasant to use than the steering post type; their one disadvantage is that they get in the way of the middle passenger when three are carried in front. The MG's shift lever is short, stiff and sturdy, of a piece with the rest of the automobile. Leather upholstery is standard, so is a heater, and this is not the case with most British cars. It has been only in recent years that the British have conceded the necessity for car heaters, and most of the sporting types still take a fairly distant view of them.

Another old-line British house, Hillman, has a neat, well-designed and wellmade four-passenger convertible selling around $2265. The car measures 162 inches overall and looks to be derivative of some American design practice – the best of it, Standard shift only, $1695, 52 horsepower. The Hillman is a small car, but it's roomy. Many buyers entering a foreign car for the first time expect to be cramped. They forget that the cars are built for Europeans, who are standard-size people with two legs, two arms, one head and so on. Even as me and thee. The front-seat head room in 40-odd imported automobiles ranges between 34 and 39 inches; the leg room between 35 and 48, with most makes falling somewhere in the middle. The Hillman, for example, has 38 inches of head room and about 36 of front leg room. The idea that most small imports are cramped in the rear is widespread, yet the three biggest sellers, the English Ford, the Volkswagen and the Renault Dauphine, average 39 inches of rear leg room, and the standard Chevrolet, Ford and Plymouth only 40.2 inches. One and two-tenths inches make very little difference.

The Borgward, made in West Germany, is a notably sturdy car, currently available as sedan, coupe and station wagon. The sedan is $2495, measures 173 inches and will get about 22 miles to the gallon out of a 60-horsepower engine with standard transmission – no other kind is available. The Borgward is designed to run 100,000 miles without major attention. Some owners have reported difficulty getting into the firstgear slot in the transmission and it's a point worth checking.

Another West German job is the DKW, sometimes known as Das Kleine Wunder. This is a three-cylinder, two-stroke car. A two-stroke engine is just that: it completes its cycle in two strokes instead of the standard four and thus produces twice as many power impulses. The standard two-stroke engine has seven moving parts: three pistons, three connecting-rods, one crankshaft. There are no valves and no camshafts. A two-stroke engine has a characteristic nervous, blatting, busy sound, particularly on the over-run, and because it usually has roller bearings, it's quick to accelerate. The so-called "big" DKW (there's a smaller one, the 750) sells for $1995, is 170 inches and produces 50 horsepower. A heater is standard. Like most European cars, the DKW has a place for a radio, but it's optional. Windshield washers are not often standard, either. Two-stroke cars, for reasons involving lubrication problems, are built with a free wheel and when the free wheel is engaged, the DKW can be shifted without use of the clutch except for starting and stopping.

Pronounced Go-lee-aht, the Goliath is a West German sedan at $1949 runing a flat four engine that produces 63 horsepower. The flat engine is very stylish just now, what with Corvair having followed VW and Porsche in its use.

Mercedes-Benz produces one of the most varied lines of quality motorcars the world has ever seen, but most of them are carried outside the category of small town car either by price or size or both. The 180 model, however, is compact at 177 inches. This is a fourcylinder-engine car, but it's an exceptionally smooth, vibration-free four cylinder producing 78 horsepower. Mercedes-Benz cars are esteemed for longevity and excellence of design, and the 180 is a characteristic product of a house that makes a fetish out of the most rigid possible inspection procedures. A diesel-engine version, the 180D, is available at $3517, The D version produces fewer horses (46) and is marked by a higher noise level and a lumpier idle than the other, but it will run 40 miles or so to a gallon of 25-cent fuel.

Opel is another old-line German house, now a creature of General Motors, and a pretty good sedan is available from Opel at $1957. It goes 174 inches, produces 79 horsepower, has 35 inches of head room and 44 inches of leg room in front and runs on a standard transmission with nothing optional offered. The Opel has a Detroit air about it, wears a little more chrome than most imports and has that "the-girls-have-been-here" look about the upholstery and interior fittings. Nice car, though, with heater and windshield washers and white tires and like that. Disappointment will dog you if you seek, in shopping most European cars, wide areas of option on upholstery material or paint colors. Europeans still consider the small and medium-sized cars to be basically utilitarian, designed as transportation not status symbols, and a choice of six colors, of leather or two kinds of cloth satisfies most customers. Some odd fabrics show up occasionally. I've seen German, Swedish and French cars upholstered in corduroy. I found it pleasant to the touch and I suspect it would wear well. The weirdest upholstery material is currently used by the Russians: a short-nap plush, of the kind we used to use in Pullman cars, often shows up in Moskvich (a four-cylinder, 45-horsepower job now available in this country at around $1500), Volga and Chaika cars, frequently in a raspberry red. It's a mistake, however, to knock Russian automobiles. They are very well made indeed. The editor of a leading British technical journal told me, after touring Soviet car factories, that he thought the cars he saw being built would last "damned near forever."

The French-built Peugeot has been called, by the well-known magazine Road & Track, one of the seven best-built cars in the world. It costs $2175 with whitewall tires, windshield washer, heater, measures 176 inches and produces 65 horsepower. It has fully reclining front seats, an amenity available on some other European cars (SAAB, for example) and one for which the shopper should inquire. Very restful. Very handy.

Panhard is an old, old name in French automobile history, and the current Panhard is a lively, rather hairy little automobile, not really so little at 180 inches. It has a two-cylinder engine (but they're big cylinders, almost 500 c.c. apiece) driving the front wheels. The Panhard has been the basis of a good number of successful competition cars in Europe, and many drivers find the notion that they're being whistled along by only two cylinders very appealing. The car costs $1697 and will deliver 31 miled to the gallon. It's air-cooled, and the heater operates on the theory that hot air can be gathered from around the exhaust stacks and blown into the car through ducts. The system works well enough for moderate climes, but a Minnesota customer might wish to look into gasolinefired heaters.

ThÉ Volkswagen is the biggest seller among imported cars, but the Renault Dauphine has been crowding it hard for the past few months, outselling it in some areas. The Dauphine's engine is rear-mounted and water-cooled; it sells for $1645 and is certainly better looking than the VW. It's a little shorter, too: 142 inches. It has 34 inches of head room in front, 40 inches of leg room. It's available with a Ferlec automatic clutch, and so is Renault's four-seater convertible, the Caravelle, at $2495. If rarity intrigues you, the Czechoslovakian Skoda comes in a nice sedan at around $1575.

The British-made Riley 1.5-liter sedan comes of a long and honored line of sports cars famous in the Thirties for (continued on page 101) New Town Car (continued from page 81) speed and power. It's priced at $2320, measures 153 inches and produces 65 horsepower. There's a standard shift only, no automatics available. This is a handsome little car, nicely finished inside and out, and lively in performance.

SAAB stands for Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, a firm specializing in aircraft production. Svenska Aeroplan AB makes the Draken fighter, one of the best single-seater jets flying today, and the company makes three versions of the SAAB automobile: a sedan, a granturismo sedan and a station wagon. The sedan goes for $1895 and has a three-cylinder two-stroke engine similar to the DKW's. The SAAB is a wind-tunnel car, and hence quiet at high speed; it has a front-wheel drive, with consequent benefit in snow and ice, plus remarkable road adhesion coupled with mechanical sturdiness. It also offers as option the only over-the-shoulder seat belts available today. Over-the-shoulder belts are the only sensible kind, and one enterprising fellow rolled a SAAB five times and walked away from it because he was strapped down. The Gran Turismo 750 model, designed for fast point-to-point driving, rallies and competition, costs a basic $2560.

The Simca Aronde has at least one accessory not found on too many other cars: a town-and-country horn, soft and loud. (Heater and windshield washer come with it, too, for $1745.) It stands 164 inches and puts about 50 horsepower through a standard transmission. The Simca line is handled by Chrysler in this country.

Two British town cars that offer overdrive as an option are the Singer and the Sunbeam Rapier, at $2349 and $2499. They're the same size – 163 inches – but the Singer offers 60 horsepower, the Sunbeam 73. The Singer price quoted is for the convertible. Sunbeam also has a convertible, but the rear seats are of the type the British call "occasional," which means that they're likely to be quite comfortable for children up to the age of eight.

Taunus sounds exotic but it's really a Ford – made in West Germany. It sells here for $2120, is in the medium-size bracket of 172 inches and produces 67 horsepower. You can have it with an automatic clutch, too.

Vauxhall is another General Motors protégé, a steady, well-made, good-looking 169-inch car with a 55-horsepower engine and a standard transmission. It costs $1958 and looks Detroity.

The Volvo – that's Latin for "I roll along" in case you'd forgotten – is made in Sweden and also looks Detroity, but ten-year-old Detroity. However, a new and better-looking model is on the way. The Volvo is something of a phenomenon: its engine produces an astonishing amount of power per square inch of capacity and is also apparently unbreakable, although these two things are usually considered to be mutually irreconcilable. One hears of Volvo engines being run to 7000 rpm in races with no apparent harm done. When smallsedan races are held, Volvos and SAABs usually split the first five or six places. The car costs $2240, is 176 inches big and puts out 87 horsepower. Transmission is standard, but three- or four-speed gear boxes are available at option. Wise men take the four. It costs no more. In Sweden the factory will insure the car for you for free, too.

Then there's the Volkswagen, at $1655 and 160 inches. This is the most popular small car in the world, designed more than twenty years ago by one of the most generously gifted of automobile designers, Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, and first brought to the attention of the world as the "People's Car" of the Thousand-Year Reich. The VW is designed to run for 100,000 miles without trouble, and many of them do, although probably most belong to Europeans who understand what maintenance means. Two factors play heavy parts in the VW's longevity: body styling that changes almost not at all, and an engine purposely restricted by design so that it cannot be made to run too fast. A prettier, and more expensive, version of the VW, with an Italian body, is the Karmann-Ghia, but it's really only a two-seater.

Two small British four-seaters are: the Triumph sedan by the producers of the famed TR-3 two-seater, at $1995, and the Morris Minor 1000 convertible at $1760. The Minor is one of the besthandling small cars in the world. A gentleman of my acquaintance who knows as much about sports cars as anyone in the world, and who can afford anything he likes, drove a supercharged Morris Minor back and forth to work for many months in preference to any one of the other fifty-odd cars in his garage. The Minor measures 148 inches, a bit bigger than the competing Austin A40 at 144 and $1795.

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Now, what of the hacks, the four-passenger, get-around-town small cars? In the first place, we're using the word "hack" in the old and honorable sense: a gentleman's conveyance meant primarily for utility. "The station hack" was what the blood of the Nineties told the coachman to bring around from the carriage house when he had short-haul errands to do. And there's nothing that says a hack can't be used for longer trips. It certainly can. It won't be as fast and it won't be as comfortable, but it will go there and come back and you'll make a little money on gasoline.

A new Austin 7 is in production, al- though not widely distributed as yet. This is a small squarish automobile by Alec Issigonis, the young British designer who did the Morris Minor. The car – called the Mini-Minor – is built around a "transaxle" – transmission and axle combined, and in this case combined with the engine, which sits on top of the axle-transmission, crosswise, and drives the front wheels. The car is stubby and boxy-looking, but there's plenty of room for four people and insulation from road shock, but road and engine noise is of a high order. Most European cars produce more engine and gear noise than Americans are used to hearing. Two reasons might be cited: (1) Noise doesn't interfere with the performance of the car, and that's what counts; (2) Many keen drivers like engine noise. The Austin 7 appears to be an exception, and because it can be sold for around $1600 it might be a very popular exception.

The BMW (Bayrischen Motoren Werke) "600" is a two-cylinder two-door small automobile – but it's a two-door with a difference: one door opens on the side, and the other opens the whole front of the vehicle. Most convenient for disembarking. You just drive straight into the curb, using half an ordinary parking space, open the door and step onto the sidewalk. It goes for $1398, or $1497 with a sunroof, the overall length is 117 inches, and a heater is standard equipment. The engine is air-cooled.

The Renault people make a car, called the 4CV, one size down from their Dauphine: 4 chevaux-vapeur, or steam-horses. The 4CV runs a rearmounted, water-cooled 750-c.c. engine. This is a sturdy four-passenger automobile for $1345, well suited indeed to town hacking. (The French police use it sometimes.) The 4CV was designed by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche while the French held him after World War II, and because it is not the world's best-looking car there are those who sometimes call it "Porsche's Revenge." I, however, am not among them.

Citroën has an even smaller car: the 2CV. This is not a pretty thing either, but it shows in its unusual design features – front-wheel drive, novel suspension – the depth of Citroën's experience. You can run it for next to nothing: say 50 miles to the gallon if you baby it, and one reason there aren't many in this country is that the wily French stand in line to buy them as the factory bangs them out. Room for four and a sunroof, $1095.

The Flat 600, product of the biggest automobile manufacturer in Italy, is a kind of hack de luxe, with ample room for four people in a well-finished small car. Sunroof, $1450, heater, whitewalls, windshield washer. 129 inches, grázie.

Two Japanese entrants in the hack derby are the Datsun and the Toyopet, the Datsun at $1616, the Toyopet, $2000. The Datsun runs 153 inches and 37 horsepower, the Toyopet 169 and 60. Both have standard shifts and no options. The prewar notion that Japanese mechanical devices were shoddy and cheap has no place relative to Japanese automobiles of today, and careful thought has gone into them: the Toyopet, for example, has a trouble lamp that plugs into the dashboard, and a warning light that goes on if any door is ajar.

The English Ford Anglia is a buy at $1583. It's shorter than the VW at 150 inches and it's a much more conventional-looking automobile. Ford service from coast to coast, of course. The car won't astonish you with its acceleration, but it's a dandy little bucket to use around town. So is the Metropolitan, the result of Anglo-American collaboration, with American Motors at the bottom of it. The Metropolitan, 150 inches, sells for $1626 and does well in traffic-light acceleration tests, since it has a 56-horsepower engine.

The NSU Prinz is an honestly made, good-looking little German Wagen which had an aluminum, air-cooled, rear-mounted engine some time before Corvair did. It will do 50 miles to the gallon if you watch yourself. The Prinz costs $1398 and is fitted with monster bumpers and over-riders to cope with back-and-bash big-city parking methods. The Vespa 400 is another miniature with a rear-mounted air-cooled engine. You can buy it for $1080 and you'll be surprised, considering the car's small size, at the quality of the ride it produces.

That is about it. Somewhere among these forty-odd makes of automobiles, small and smaller, is the solution to your problem, whether it involves economy, speed, handling, or simple transportation of the body. One caveat: don't buy an unfamiliar type of automobile without a full demonstration, and by full demonstration I mean twenty-five miles, minimally, of varied road surface.